For those who are not familiar with getting on IRC, here's what Mitch did:

For Windows: Download and install Pidgin (free IM chat software for Windows -- there's plenty of other free software to choose from for Windows and other OSs).

For Macs - a reasonable client is Snak, http://www.snak.com/. It's $29 shareware with a 30 day free evaluation. A better IRC client for Mac OS X (that also supports SILC) and is Free Software is Colloquy.

For those who run Ubuntu and are not familiar with IRC (unlikely?): $ sudo aptitude install xchat